Conservation of the Urban Identity (Part 1): Urban Architecture

By Guest Author Vaswar Mitra

Cultural heritage can be regarded as any existing element that is a part of the traditions, lifestyles, knowledge, and ideas of a group of people. Of these, ‘built heritage’ implies monuments and works of architecture that are of historical and artistic importance. Urban architecture is in fact a representation of the history of a people, a history that is frozen in brick, stone, and mortar. Yet, as we see our built heritage disappearing every day, to be replaced by a more universal and non-region-specific architecture, the first question we have to ask is not how to conserve, but rather understand why we should conserve and rejuvenate our architecture. How relevant are these buildings to us now?

Any town or city is always in a state of flux, its physical and social fabric transforming with shifts in demography and economy. This transformation, at the cusp of the forces of globalization, is happening in a more widespread and rapid manner, moving too fast to allow adaptation and therefore encouraging a direct grafting of an alien built environment into an ill-fitting context. Most of the cities in the Middle East have turned into generic urbanscapes – functional, efficient, and yet progressively losing touch with vernacular building sensibilities. Built heritage connects an individual to the past and conveys a sense of rootedness and identity. What we consider our built heritage has always been a function of our lifestyle and traditions, and its decay and loss implies a similar disconnect with ideas and practices which were our own.

Apart from their historical and archaeological significance, a number of these older buildings are storehouses of forgotten building techniques and unique responses to the climate which an obsession with a Le Corbusier-style Modernism has gradually undermined. Such has been the case in many countries of Africa and Asia, where in the postcolonial era architects have redeployed and reinterpreted vernacular construction systems and materials to find cost-effective solutions to modern problems.

The increasing congestion of the historic cores of the world’s cities results in the collapse of infrastructure and puts further stress on the buildings, thereby accelerating their decay. To date, conservation and decongestion have not been applied simultaneously in most developing countries, resulting in spiking trends of unsustainable development. Ideally, conserving and upgrading a city’s built environment should ensure a better quality of life for its inhabitants and address persisting housing concerns.

Perhaps the most understated importance is the economic relevance of historic architecture in an urban context. Undertaking urban conservation for simply an aesthetic and sculptural value would be unsustainable by itself. Therefore, the heritage buildings in many cities have been developed to provide a significant economic boost to the entire city as a whole. This has been achieved through public-private partnerships that involve the government, the occupants of the heritage buildings, and private firms. Tourism is the most targeted sector because of the returns it brings, but on a larger scale, renting out these spaces to professional associations that do not have high energy requirements and need fewer infrastructural additions to a building, has worked as well. Projects following this model, financed by the World Bank, showed an 18% economic rate of return.

Conservation at the micro-level of scattered individual structures has been replaced in many cities by large-scale projects that create a ‘heritage zone’ that remains in conflict  with the modern city. The type of architecture involved in such interventions has to be of a new order, balancing the past and the present, through subtle or contrasting architecture, adaptive reuse, and imitation.

References:

Dr. Ismail Serageldin: ‘Revitalizing Historic Cities: Towards a Public-Private Partnership’
Dr. Raymond Lemaire: ‘Why do we preserve historic towns?’
Dr. Ihsan Fethi: ‘Conservation in the Islamic World’

This segment is part 1 in the series : Conservation of the Urban Identity
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